


Crossroads

by emluv



Series: Secrets, Lies, and Spies [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Spoilers, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier Spoilers, Friendship, Gen, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-01-27 16:37:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1717370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emluv/pseuds/emluv
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first hint Clint has that something’s gone wrong comes when Fury fails to reply to his scheduled check-in. Things just go to shit from there...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Fourth story in a series that will follow the various Avengers and agents of SHIELD through the fallout of the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. It begins prior to the end of CATWS, approximately when Steve and Natasha take their road trip to New Jersey, and runs concurrent to the events of the first three stories in this series.

The first hint Clint has that something’s gone wrong comes when Fury fails to reply to his scheduled check-in.

 

He’s been country-hopping for well over a year, deep undercover as often as not, but every week, regular as clockwork, he reports to Fury through secure channels during a predetermined window. And every single time, Fury responds, generally just a simple ping to confirm, but sometimes with an update or fresh orders. Technically he has his own window – the man’s busy running SHIELD, after all. He can’t exactly drop everything to send Barton a comm – but Clint can count on one hand the number of times it’s taken Fury more than an hour to get back to him and still have a couple fingers leftover.

 

When Fury first sent him off on this assignment, Clint’s paranoid brain (Yes, even after six months of psych appointments. Hell, even before Loki he was a paranoid bastard, and paranoia and mind control are not the same thing.) had ramped up, and he’d been sure it was a convenient way to make him disappear. Send him undercover on a long-term op, need-to-know, and who was going to ask after him, anyway, with all the shit he’d done, brainwashed or not? The only ones who’d have cared even before New York were Natasha and Coulson, and Fury’d shipped Nat down to D.C. to teach Captain America to be a twenty-first-century agent, and Coulson was… well. By the time anyone blinked and wondered what might have happened to Clint, he’d have been long gone, rotting in some shallow grave in a country less than inclined to let Americans come look for him.

 

It didn’t help that his marching orders were vague to start, barely more than a couple of shady contacts to track and pump for details on seemingly unrelated situations: a new, lethal street drug in Shanghai; the disappearance of a brilliant Austrian physicist; a stolen artifact from a museum in Cairo. But months went by and the mission got weirder. Clint unearthed no less than three abandoned labs with questionable equipment, signs of experiments on human subjects, and a disturbing string of missing persons reports that stretched over three continents but yielded no obvious pattern. Whatever else was on the director’s agenda, the op was genuine and someone needed to be tracking this shit. Maybe it was convenient to get Clint out of the country – killing two birds with one stone, so to speak – but if there is a target on his head, at least Fury isn’t the one taking aim.

 

He waits, per protocol, for Fury to respond, but after the third hour he’s pacing a groove into the floor of the shitty one-room apartment he’s been renting for the last couple of weeks, and by the bottom half of the final hour, he’s started prepping to leave. He packs his gear, strips the bedding, and wipes the major surfaces for fingerprints. The reality is, he can’t imagine a scenario that would prevent Fury from at least getting him a message, not short of interplanetary war, and then surely someone would remember he’s an Avenger and pull him out of the field.

 

When the clock finishes ticking down, Clint checks his weapons, slips his pack onto his back, grabs his duffel and goes out the window. He’s just one floor up, and it’s child’s play to swing off the ledge and drop lightly into the minor side street below, his movements camouflaged by the late – well, at this point early – hour and poor lighting. The real problem lies in the proximity of the nearest extraction point. Libya’s not exactly welcoming these days, and he needs to cross two borders to get to the closest official SHIELD safe house. Flying commercial is out of the question, but maybe if he takes the bus from Aziziya back toward Tripoli, he can find a boat heading in the right direction, though he dislikes boats in general as an escape option on account of their having not a lot of exit strategies.

 

The streets are silent, but he still skirts the main road as long as possible, sticking to the shadows to avoid unnecessary attention, checking to make sure no one’s following him. He’s halfway to the main square and its tiny bus terminal when he feels his phone vibrate from the depths of his inner jacket pocket. “Finally,” he mutters.

 

He quickly diverts into a narrow, deserted lane and tugs out the device, frowning when he realizes the encoded message comes from Natasha instead of Fury. He thumbs in the key, eyes glued to the small screen as the green digitized figures reshape into six words that make his heart stop.

 

FURY DEAD. SHIELD COMPROMISED. GET OUT.

 

~*~

 

Climbing back up to the second story and swinging himself in the window takes just a bit more effort than it had to climb down. It’s a risk, returning to the little apartment, but “getting out” requires a very different approach than simply getting himself to an evacuation site, and he needs somewhere to prep.

 

He had waited after the message came through, wasted five precious minutes hoping Nat would send something more, even though he knew she was already gone, her phone trashed, no hope of further information, never mind the chance to respond. It was a shot in the dark, her one attempt to warn him before she dropped off the radar herself. Resigned, he had finally smashed his own phone and scattered the pieces as he wove his way back the way he had come, albeit by a far more circuitous route.

 

Now he dumps his gear and sorts through his belongings, dividing everything rapidly into two piles – SHIELD’s and his. He’s sadly short of civilian clothing, but that’s the least of his worries right now. Pulling out his first aid kit and a knife, he heads into the bathroom, drops his cargo pants, and shoves his boxer-briefs down below his knees. He splashes the knife and his fingers with alcohol, then dampens a square of cotton to clean his left hip as well. He feels carefully along the upper edge of his hip bone until he locates the knobby tracker embedded in the muscle. It’s going to hurt like a bitch, but there’s not much choice. Bracing himself, he slices carefully through several layers and uses the tip of the blade to pop the tracker forward until he can catch it and draw it out. He drops it on the counter top and quickly wipes up at the blood running down his hip.

 

It takes a few stitches to close him up, almost worse than cutting out the tracker but far better than the alternative, and, teeth clenched, he finishes the job off with another round of alcohol and a gauze bandage. He tugs his clothing into place, then using the handle of his knife, smashes the tracker and flushes it down the drain. He washes up, and swallows an antibiotic with a couple of handfuls of water.

 

Back in the room, he repacks his own belongings in his knapsack, including small bundles of cash in several currencies, his spare hand gun and knife. The rest of the weapons get secured on his person, concealed carefully with ease of access in mind. He rips out the hard drive of the laptop and tucks it in his pocket, then slides the body under the bed where it won’t be immediately visible. There’s no way he can take his bow. Both it and the case are SHIELD issue, and he has no idea if there’s a tracker built into them.

 

Finally, he pulls out the false bottom of his duffel and sorts through his passports, every single one of them for a SHIELD-built cover. Depending how deep this mess goes, he could be well and truly fucked. For what must be the tenth time in the last fifteen minutes he swears under his breath and wishes Natasha had seen fit to share just a little more information. Fury dead and SHIELD compromised are bad enough, but does that mean someone is coming for him? Are they scanning all ports of call for his face? Does anyone beyond Fury even know where he is?

 

It doesn’t matter. He’ll have to risk traveling on a SHIELD alias long enough to get the hell out of Africa. If he can make it to Spain, he has a stash with fake I.D. he sourced himself, nothing SHIELD will be looking for, or anyone else, for that matter.

 

Decision made, he chooses two passports – one he has yet to use on this op and one he’s only used very briefly while he was still combing through Eastern Europe. He takes a knife to the rest, tearing them apart as best he can, then torches them in the tub until the pieces are crispy and blackened, though the smell leaves a great deal to be desired. He wets them down and leaves them where they are. Any comers are welcome to try to make sense of them.

 

The last thing in the secret compartment of his duffel is a StarkPhone, a gift from the man himself following the battle in New York. He apparently gave them to all the Avengers. Clint had tried to refuse it, but Tony had insisted, remarking that you never knew when it might come in handy to be able to make an untraceable call. Unsure of his footing with SHIELD after Loki, Clint had relented. Natasha reminded him to take it when he left for this op, and he’s never been so glad to have taken her advice. He tucks it and its charger in his knapsack, throws the whole thing onto his back, and gives the room a careful once over. Just ten minutes after he returned to the apartment, he’s swinging himself back out through the window, mindful of his hip, and down to the darkened street. Several blocks away, he fishes the hard drive out of his pocket and drops it through a grate into the sewers, barely breaking his stride.

 

~*~

 

TBC


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In this chapter, Clint puts a fair distance between himself and the site of his last known mission report, learns a bit more about what is happening with SHIELD, and starts to attempt to form a plan of action.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From here on out, Clint travels a great deal. I've been to many of the places he visits, and others I've researched to the best of my ability. But in all cases, there will likely be shifts in detail for plot expediency. I like to think the world the Avengers & co. inhabit is one very, very similar but not identical to our own. So please bear with me if something is a little off. :)

It takes more than twenty hours, spent primarily on rickety old buses, not one of which knows the meaning of suspension, but Clint makes it through two border crossings and the document check at Tanger Med without drawing a second glance, arriving in time to catch the two a.m. ferry to Algeciras, since it’s kindly running half an hour behind schedule. He’s one of just a dozen or so passengers, everyone groggy and intent on keeping to themselves, so it’s easy to find a seat inside, well away from anyone else. Propping his bag on the bench beside him, up against the window, he leans gratefully into its lumpy mass and stretches out his legs, favoring his left hip. He has a good view of both the front and rear exits as well as the stairs to the upper deck, a paper cup of bitter coffee, and a sweet roll to keep him occupied.

 

It’s tempting to doze. He’s barely caught more than a couple hours of sleep since starting out and he’s running on adrenaline, frayed nerves, and hastily snatched street food. But with no one watching his back and no details as to the situation, he can’t afford to risk letting his guard down in such an unsecure location. He’s trained for this, can stay alert for a good twelve hours more if necessary without anything stronger than a couple of caffeine fixes. The challenge will be to keep his thoughts from running wild in the absence of a decent distraction.

 

The ferry crossing runs long, nearly three hours, the choppy waters making it seem like an interminable rollercoaster ride. Clint’s not exactly prone to getting seasick, but his stomach feels vaguely unsettled by the time he sets foot on dry land again, and he’s happy enough to blame it on the trip combined with a day of poor nutritional choices. His Spanish passport allows him to clear the terminal without delay, but he still has more than an hour before the first bus out to Malaga and it’s too early for anything to be open, leaving him no choice but to wait in the deserted bus station with the anxious sense that the clock is ticking down. Whatever has happened within SHIELD, he can’t hope to escape the backlash forever, not if it was serious enough for Natasha to warn him. He feels like he’s running against some sort of deadline.

 

By the time he reaches Malaga, it’s nine a.m. and he forces himself to pause long enough to find a small café for breakfast. While he eats, he pulls out the StarkPhone and turns it on. It fires up remarkably quickly, and he spares a moment to send up a silent thanks to Tony and his insane love for all things tech. By the time he’s downed his toast and milky coffee, he’s located a place to rent a moped just a couple of streets away.

 

Keeping a stash of belongings in a foreign city isn’t always easy or affordable. Clint knows Natasha maintains several tiny apartments around the world, but he tends to take a more practical approach, believing that as long as he has sufficient cash and the right identification, he can find accommodations on the fly. So once he’s picked up his bike, he rides out to the storage unit he rents in the Mijas Costa district. It’s a minimal space, the smallest they offer, just big enough for the extras he would need if he found himself on the run.

 

Once inside, Clint disables his secondary security system and goes about switching out his belongings. He trades his current pack for the larger one stored in the unit, transferring over everything except for the SHIELD-issue passports. Then he adds a few fresh changes of clothes including some a bit more upscale than what he’s been wearing, two clean passports, and his entire stash of euros. Finally, from a box labeled “sporting goods,” he pulls a collapsible bow and matching quiver of arrows, each just short enough to slip into the new, larger backpack. He’s out the door and back on the road into the heart of the city in less than fifteen minutes.

 

To be truly safe, Clint knows he needs to leave the country, to clock himself going through customs somewhere using one of his new cover identities. But he’s been on the run for thirty hours and without real sleep for longer, and to keep going without rest is to risk getting sloppy.

 

He turns in the moped and takes a cab to a different part of the city, then checks into a small, modest hotel. The room’s a single with attached bath on the third floor, clean but with no amenities beyond a low dresser and a dubious looking ceiling fan. Clint could not possibly care less. He secures the door and the single window, takes a brutally hot shower, checks his stitches, and falls into bed with a gun and his phone tucked under the pillow. In mere moments, he’s asleep.

 

~*~

 

Clint wakes ravenously hungry, streams of fading sunlight slanting low across the wooden floor of his room, the sounds of Malaga emerging from siesta drifting up from the street. He’s slept straight through lunch and most of the afternoon, though he could probably go for another couple of hours if he didn’t feel the need to assess his situation and to silence his stomach, not necessarily in that order.

 

He gets up and stretches, pleased to find the pain in his hip no more than a dull ache. Digging through his pack, he finds clean jeans and a shirt that’s not too terribly wrinkled and gets dressed, then secures his belongings and goes downstairs.

 

The same young woman who checked him in is working the front desk, so he stops for advice on somewhere to eat despite the early hour, not wanting to wait for the traditional late Spanish dinner. He signed the book using a British passport, and the woman obviously remembers, chattering pleasantly in a mixture of Spanish and English, directing him toward several likely eateries along the street that runs toward the waterfront. He thanks her and heads out into the early evening twilight.

 

Rather than spoil himself for an actual dinner, he ends up at a small cafeteria-style place where he picks up bread and olives and some fruit to take the edge off, with the idea of getting tapas and maybe a glass of wine in an hour or two. The front of the restaurant is open to the street, and a nice breeze is blowing in from the water a few blocks away. He sits and eats, making an effort not to wolf it all down, and lets his thoughts settle.

 

There’s a reason he chose to access his stash in Spain, beyond the obvious proximity and the ease of catching a ferry. SHIELD has several full-scale, dedicated bases in Europe – London, Paris, Rome, and Prague – and his plan, such as it is, involves avoiding all of them. Right now, Switzerland has a lot of appeal, at least short term. What he really wants is to track down Natasha or, failing that, some decent intel about the situation.

 

He wipes off his hands and pulls out his phone. “Come on, come on,” he says softly, but no new messages have come through. He opens the browser and taps in the URL for a U.S.-news aggregator. A flood of headlines with Washington datelines scrolls over the small screen, and he nearly drops his phone as the first image loads revealing a low-quality photo of the Triskelion with a giant hole in its side, unidentifiable debris half submerged in the river below it. “Fuck,” he breathes.

 

Clicking link after link, Clint attempts to put together some sort of idea of what the hell is going on, but the only thing he knows for sure is that SHIELD has somehow imploded from within. Steve Rogers and Natasha Romanoff have been named as responsible for the destruction of three SHIELD-owned helicarriers upon their launch that morning, as well as the damage to the Triskelion, though Steve’s status in the wake of the attack is unknown. If that weren’t enough, someone has declassified the contents of SHIELD’s servers, dumping them onto the internet and thereby revealing the existence of Hydra in SHIELD’s ranks, apparently all the way up to the highest levels.

 

Laughter catches his attention and he jerks his head up, realizing that it’s grown dark. A pair of couples walk arm in arm, four across down the sidewalk, leaning in close, obviously sharing an amusing story. He envies them their bubble of normality; it’s something he can’t recall ever having for himself, not really, but for the last dozen years SHIELD has been as close as he ever got, far closer than he ever anticipated. Not normal by a regular person’s standards, of course, but steady, reliable, a handful of people he could trust with his secrets and even more he could trust to watch his back, all of them working together to make the world a safer place.

 

Only now it seems it was a lie, that he’s been working with Hydra. _For_ Hydra? He doesn’t even know.

 

His first thought is that he really wants a shot of liquor. Possibly an entire bottle. Something strong. But he doesn’t have a death wish, no matter what might have been suggested over the years, and he knows to start drinking right now would be a very bad idea. More than ever, it’s important for him to stay sharp and maintain an awareness of his surroundings.

 

Standing, he throws away the wrappers from his snack, then wanders casually, deliberately down the street until he finds a bar that’s doing a brisk business, mostly families, clearly a local favorite. He goes in and slides onto an available stool at the far end of the bar, allowing him a view of the door, and chats for a few minutes with the man behind the counter, ordering the recommended plates of garlic shrimp, more olives, potatoes, and a small glass of house red that he fully intends to nurse.

 

His Spanish can pass for local depending on the region, but he carefully allows the British inflection that goes with his cover to color his words. The barman switches to English when he comes back with the food. “Here on vacation?” he asks.

 

Clint smiles. “Just passing through for the day, heading up to Valencia. I can see I’ll need to come back when I have more time.”

 

“English, yes?”

 

He nods. “From Brighton,” he adds, anticipating the man’s next question.

 

“Ah, you like the seaside then,” he says jovially. “You British love our warmer coastline.”

 

“Swimming in the Channel takes determination,” he agrees, lifting his glass and taking a sip. “Very nice, gracias,” he says, nodding at the wine.

 

The man takes the hint and smiles in acknowledgement before moving down the bar to help another patron. Clint makes a point of eating slowly, splitting his attention between his meal and the sort of casual people watching practiced by someone traveling alone but not seeking to engage. He overhears a couple of Spaniards discussing what they seem to consider the latest act of terror on American soil, but the full thrust of the news seems not to have made much of an impression here as of yet.

 

On the way back to his hotel, he takes a different route, meandering slowly, alert to every sound and the people around him, but he sees nothing beyond the expected tourists and locals out on the town, enjoying the mild weather and the start of the weekend. No one strikes him as suspicious, and, more important, no one follows him.

 

In his room, he sits on the floor in the dark, putting the bulk of the bed, such as it is, between himself and the window, staying out of sight. He takes the time to examine his StarkPhone in detail, going through the various options and noting that Stark had preprogrammed information for all the other Avengers into the contacts section, even Thor, though a note indicating his phone will only work in the local realm actually startles a laugh out of Clint.

 

He debates calling Stark for all of thirty seconds but ultimately rejects the idea. Last he heard, the man was recovering from long-overdue surgery to remove the shrapnel from his heart, though it’s been nearly a year at this point. Still, it’s not as if they’ve been in touch since the Chitauri invasion. He knows Banner even less than Stark, and Rogers clearly has his hands full if the news outlets are to be believed – though Clint refuses to consider that Cap didn’t make it through whatever went down that morning. The man survived seventy years on ice; he’s harder to kill than the media realizes.

 

Which leaves Natasha. He opens up a new message and considers for several long minutes, then quickly types in a few words:

 

ON THE MOVE. YOU OK?

 

He hits send, knowing that if she’s using her own StarkPhone, she’ll receive the note eventually and understand he heeded her warning. Whether or not she chooses to respond is another thing entirely.

 

“Now what?” he mutters into the dark. He needs to move, to get out of Spain, and Switzerland still looks to be as good a choice as any, but he isn’t going anywhere until morning. The info dump onto the internet calls like a siren song; he needs to know how much of his own life is now out there for anyone to read, but he also feels a burning desire to learn more about the organization he thought, for all its secrets, he understood fairly well.

 

He’s still trying to wrap his brain around the idea that Hydra was within SHIELD. It seems utterly impossible, and yet… he supposes it explains a few of the stranger goings on over the years.

 

Glancing down at the phone in his hands, he makes the conscious choice to leave Pandora’s box shut for the time being. He’ll start in on internet searches soon enough, but only once he’s left town, and possibly gotten his hands on a tablet or something with a slightly larger screen. For now, he needs to rest and get ready to leave again.

 

He creeps carefully around the room, putting several traps into place against unwanted visitors, then snags a pillow and blanket off the bed and slides back down into his corner away from the window. The floor’s not the most comfortable place, but he’s slept on far worse. Phone balanced carefully on his lap, he leans against the wall, pillow behind his back, and closes his eyes.

 

~*~

 

TBC 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint keeps moving, but the world starts catching up...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note the violence tag for this story. That starts kicking in here.

Clint leaves Malaga early the next morning, opting to veer away from the coast (and Valencia, where he told the bartender he was going) and instead boarding a train that will eventually get him to Madrid. From there he can zigzag up through southern France and then cut over to Switzerland through Geneva. He chooses a window seat with good sights to both ends of the car and tries to lose himself in the gentle, rhythmic rocking of the train as it zips smoothly along on the rails, sheer luxury after the buses and ferry that have brought him this far. But he’s slept just enough to allow his thoughts to whirl, and he finds himself worrying about Natasha, trying to absorb the fact that Fury’s dead, wondering about some of the other SHIELD agents he considers friends, or at least respects – Sitwell, May, Hand, Garrett – and turning over the puzzle of the data leak.

 

It would have taken someone with extraordinarily high clearance within the organization to decrypt SHIELD servers to the point where they could take all that information public. Either that or an unreasonably talented hacker. Stark comes instantly to mind, but Clint can’t imagine why Tony would do such a thing. Sure, he’d hacked SHIELD back during the Chitauri mess and found out about the Phase 2 weapons, but that was for his own curiosity and leverage. This… this isn’t that. This info dump is something entirely different.

 

Times like this, Clint becomes hyper aware of missing Coulson. The senior agent would have known exactly what was going on, been able to peel away all the layers of intrigue and confusion to find the heart of the situation, then issued orders in that confident, competent manner of his, and Clint would have been able to trust that he’d put them on the correct path. Instead he’s floundering alone. At least Coulson didn’t live to see SHIELD come to this, he thinks. Hydra within the hierarchy; God, the man’s probably rolling in his grave.

 

In Madrid, he switches trains and continues on to Toulouse, getting into the small French city mid-afternoon. Exhaustion has caught up with him, and he finds himself a small hotel, checking in for two nights, and spends the following day – a Sunday – meandering the streets, sitting in small parks, and sleeping in his narrow hotel bed. He spends more time searching the internet on his phone but comes across nothing truly enlightening, though it appears Congress has called for emergency hearings to discuss the revelations about SHIELD starting Monday. He still hasn’t heard from Natasha by the time he heads back to the station to catch an early train to Lyon.

 

It’s still only late morning when they pull into Lyon and, it being Monday, the station is crowded with an array of travelers, primarily business people. The soonest train is nearly sold out and Clint opts to wait for the next one in order to be guaranteed a seat.

 

He picks up a ham sandwich, a few snacks, and some mineral water at one of the kiosks, then settles in the waiting area where a bank of televisions are tuned to various international cable news stations, muted but with the closed captioning turned on. His French doesn’t approach his Spanish, but he’s fluent enough to get the basic gist of the reports. There’s an update on D.C., though most of it’s still old news, but he learns Steve is being released that morning from an undisclosed hospital where he was treated for injuries sustained on Friday in a battle with an unknown assassin. There’s a vague suggestion that he might be the same individual who killed Fury, and the story’s accompanied by what looks like grainy traffic cam footage of a man with longish brown hair, wearing battle armor and armed to the teeth, striding across a broad avenue toward an overturned SUV.

 

Though his attention’s primarily focused on the television screen, Clint quickly becomes aware that he’s not the only one interested in the report. Standing off to his right, a short distance from the seating area, two men dressed in what he considers toned-down combat gear are watching as well, holding a muffled but intense-looking conversation. They shift slightly, and suddenly Clint has a clear view of one of their faces – a face he most definitely recognizes. He angles himself carefully away from the pair, swiftly packs up the remainder of his food, and stores it in his pack. He checks his weapons under the guise of making sure he has his ticket, then rises, shoulders his bag, and starts off in the opposite direction, only circling back when he’s certain that he’s gone unnoticed, ending up behind a cellphone charging station a few yards away.

 

Despite the beard he’s sporting and the faux glasses he added to match his current passport, he knows he’s still recognizable, especially to a member of SHIELD’s Strike Team Beta. He and Nat helped train half those guys, and have both sparred with the rest. This one – a hand-to-hand specialist named King – had a mean temper and something to prove, never a great combination, though he worked well enough within the scope of his team. Clint remembers Nat putting him on his back more than once during a workout, and he knows King talked smack about her behind her back on several occasions, until he’d woken one morning to find himself pinned to his bunk by a set of knives through his shirt and shorts. He got the message after that, kept his trap shut, at least where he might be overheard.

 

Being an ass didn’t necessarily mean you were a bad agent. Hell, Clint knows plenty of people at SHIELD think he’s an ass, too. But he also knows Coulson had made a point of keeping Beta and Delta teams from being paired up on ops after that. No point asking for trouble. And maybe it’s unfair of him to consider that King might be part of this whole Hydra debacle, maybe it’s just that paranoia rearing its ugly head again, but Clint didn’t survive life with his father and Barney, the circus, and on his own as a merc by giving stupid, dangerous people the benefit of the doubt, and this doesn’t strike him as an appropriate time to change his strategy.

 

He lucks out when King and his buddy turn in his direction, the station’s odd acoustics making it possible to eavesdrop despite their obvious effort to keep their voices down. Not everything is audible, but Clint catches a few bits and pieces, enough to know they’ve been talking about Steve.

 

_“…nine fucking lives. Think they’ll make another…”_

_“…at the hospital. Never get close. Maybe ... out. Heard it took two tries … Fury.”_

_“…update. …finish securing Paris base. …word on Prague?”_

_“We have … orders. … assist with executions of the hold outs. Hydra doesn’t … prisoners.”_

 

The pair drift off and Clint glances down as if he’s searching through his bag, all the while struggling to control his rising rage, fingers itching to pull out his bow and shoot the fuckers then and there. Just once it would be nice to be proven wrong. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees King’s buddy head toward a newsstand while King himself makes his way toward the restrooms. He pulls his cap out of his bag and puts it on, tugging down the visor, hefts his pack, and heads after King.

 

Entering the men’s room cautiously, he sees an elderly man washing his hands and spots a pair of familiar looking boots under the door to a stall. He heads over to the sink two past the one that’s occupied with a polite nod, drops his bag beside him, and starts digging through the outside pocket. As soon as the older man finishes and leaves, Clint pulls on a pair of gloves and heads back to the stall next to King’s. It’s the work of a moment to climb onto the commode, tug loose the wire concealed in his belt, reach over the wall and get a loop around King’s neck, heaving upward with a swift twist. King struggles, kicking out at the walls of the stall, grunting and making a racket, trying to get a grip on the garrote even as he reaches for Clint, but he’s too slow, too unprepared, and soon enough he goes limp.

 

“Moron,” Clint mutters, thinking he’s being charitable. “SHIELD trained you better, but then I guess maybe Hydra didn’t.” He pulls the wire free and uses it to unhook the lock to the stall, then goes around to make sure King’s actually dead, checking for a pulse. A quick pad down unearths a ticket to Paris, confirming Clint’s conclusion as to the pair’s destination. He props him against the wall so he won’t succumb to gravity and leaves him there with his pants down around his ankles.

 

It’s only been a couple of minutes, but King’s companion will likely come searching for him sooner rather than later, so he needs to move quickly. He wipes off the wire with a paper towel and puts it away, then heaves his pack onto his back and goes into the last of the empty stalls, stepping up so his feet don’t show and propping the door open just a bare inch. From the inner pocket of his jacket, he pulls out his gun and swiftly attaches the silencer. Then he waits, and hopes no one else needs to use the restroom before King’s partner.

 

For once, the fates smile on him. The restroom door creaks open and a low voice calls out for King. “Come on, man, train’s boarding. Get a move on,” he says, coming farther into the room. Clint can just make out his profile through the crack in the door as he leans slightly to one side, obviously looking for King’s feet beneath the stall doors. He knows this agent, too, though he can’t remember his name. He thinks he’s a level three, but then things have clearly changed since the last time Clint was at HQ, so who knows what’s been going on with the juniors.

 

Lining up the shot, he watches the kid reach out to knock on King’s stall, and squeezes the trigger. The kid drops, blood dripping from his temple, an expression of surprise frozen on his face.

 

Clint steps down, takes a second head shot, and breaks down his gun. He doesn’t have time to worry about the kid or King, doesn’t have a clean-up crew coming in behind him, no longer has a safety net of any sort. It’s a long time since he was forced to do this sort of thing alone, but that doesn’t mean he’s forgotten how. He puts the gun and his gloves away, keeps his head down, and walks out of the restroom and into the terminal, losing himself in the crowd.

 

The train to Geneva departs from a track on the opposite side of the station, and he makes his way in that direction, removing both his hat and his glasses en route. He’s at the entrance to the platform when he hears the expected ruckus back the way he came, faint but gaining volume, and he ignores it, striding as casually as possible toward his train, which has started to board.

 

Once inside, he slips into a restroom and pries open his bag. He takes off his jacket and empties the pockets, then trades the black t-shirt he’s wearing for a white one, with a pale blue button down over top, buttons left undone, sleeves rolled to his elbows. He tucks his knife into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and puts his passport and ticket in his breast pocket. Everything else gets shoved back into his bag and buried under his toiletries kit and the remainder of his meal. Then he washes his hands, runs his damp fingers through his hair to make it stand up, and heads back out toward his seat.

 

The police sweep through the train exactly once. It’s cursory at best, a team of two coming down the aisle and peering at each passenger. Nose in a copy of _Le Monde_ he found abandoned on the seat across from him, Clint doesn’t even look up as they pass, and they don’t stop.

 

~*~

 

TBC 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Clint learns more about the events at the Triskelion and the SHIELD server leak, Fury proves to be a more paranoid bastard than Clint ever realized, and someone makes contact.

Clint has never been to Geneva before, not for SHIELD or on his own. Other parts of Switzerland, yes, but not Geneva. He hopes it makes it a less obvious place to look in the event anyone takes it into their head to hunt him down.

 

New cities offer no challenge, however, not at this stage of the game. He knows how to blend, how to appear confident, making it seem he’s comfortable no matter where he goes. Leaving the station, he takes a cab directly to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel and checks in for three nights. It’s a calculated expense – not the sort of place he would normally stay for anything but an op requiring an upscale cover, and just as unlikely to attract any of his former co-workers, regardless of their affiliation. It’s also classy enough that the man behind the desk doesn’t blink at his rumpled clothes and oversized backpack, even before he pulls out a stack of euros and pays for his room in advance. The dummy charge card he allows them to put on file to cover incidentals will stand up to a credit check as long as he doesn’t actually put anything on it. He can live without room service.

 

When the elevator deposits him on the sixth floor, he feels a layer of tension slough off his shoulders; it’s the highest up he’s been in weeks. His room resembles most basic European accommodations at the luxury level – plush beige carpeting, a queen bed covered in pillows, pale linens and drapes with soft brown and gold accents, high-end flat screen television, and a well-appointed desk. But he has a river view, the beige-and-rose marble bathroom features an enormous walk-in shower and heated towel racks, and the wi-fi comes with the price of his stay, not that he can use it for anything requiring a secure connection.

 

He takes the time to unpack his clothes and hang them up, mourning the loss of the SHIELD wardrobe department. If he were undercover in a place like this, they would have outfitted him appropriately with a few pricy suits and dress shirts, maybe casual slacks and light gage wool sweaters, something cashmere. As things stand, he’s on his own and painfully aware that he has exactly one outfit he can get away with wearing into any of the hotel’s restaurants.

 

Which is how, after a shower and shave and a chat with the concierge, Clint ends up spending the entirety of his afternoon shopping. He thinks Natasha would likely fall over laughing if she could see him wrangling with salespeople in his piecemeal French. But it’s worth the effort, particularly when he finds an Apple store on the other side of the river and purchases an iPad and the cable required to tether to his StarkPhone. He returns with sufficient clothes to avoid standing out, and a solid working knowledge of the city’s layout surrounding the hotel. Not that he’s seen anything suspicious yet – no one familiar or who seems overly interested in his movements – but it’s important to be prepared, no matter how he hopes to avoid a repeat of the events in Lyon.

 

The trouble with off-the-rack suits, even good qualities ones, is that they aren’t tailored to conceal a side arm, Clint reflects, as he dresses to go down for dinner. It’s a painful thought, not because he’s concerned about his ability to arm himself properly, but because it reminds him of Coulson. Seated at a small table in the hotel’s riverside restaurant, he finds himself brooding over his meal instead of reading the news on his iPad, brought down for just that purpose. The waiter hovers, clearly concerned with Clint’s lack of enthusiasm for his veal, and he ends up with an apple tart to accompany his espresso, on the house.

 

Back in the room, he strips down to boxers and a t-shirt and turns on the television, hoping the noise will help pull him out of his funk. He can’t afford to sit and mourn, to bemoan everything that’s changing. He was plenty used to loss as a kid – expected it long before he grew past his teens. Hell, SHIELD must have made him soft if he can’t adjust to having to pick up and start over again. It’s old news. Just a question of figuring out what he’s going to do.

 

He lets his mind wander as he flips channels through an array of programming in French, German, Italian, and occasionally English. Technically, he still has orders. Just because Nat warned him to get out of Libya, doesn’t mean he doesn’t still have Fury’s last set of mission parameters weighing on his mind. He’s dug up too much weird shit; he knows there’s more to find, and the chances are good it’s important.

 

Then there’s Natasha. There’s been no word, no response to the message he sent, no sign of her beyond a brief mention in the online news connected to the destruction of the helicarriers. He could track her down if he tries; the trouble is determining where to start, and frankly, it just might not be safe for either of them. Normally, that wouldn’t stop him, but in this case he suspects she’d cut him into tiny pieces if he showed up out of the blue and it somehow went south.

 

Finally, there’s all the rest of SHIELD. How deep has Hydra infiltrated, and how much ground have they covered? That asshole King and his cohort had clearly been heading to the Paris office, and from what they said, it sounded like it had fallen to Hydra. Clint’s mind reels at the implications. SHIELD isn’t just a collection of simple field offices scattered around the globe; if Hydra’s made a move on the Hub or, God help them, the Fridge, they could have unleashed far more than a power struggle within the confines of the organization. And that’s not even counting agents who were in the middle of ops when the shit hit the fan and the servers got dumped. Clint got a warning, but what about the rest? How many agents got caught out, covers blown, targets suddenly able to access every detail of the mission? His gut tells him that a good portion of his coworkers are dead, probably never even knew what was going on.

 

He finds a channel broadcasting in English – some BBC station doing world news – and tosses the remote aside in favor of hooking his phone to his new tablet. Stark’s secure connection should allow him to run internet searches unobserved, which means he can dig deeper into the data dump and get a better fix on what’s going on out there. The trouble is, he’s just one man, and he’s not certain how much good he can do, even if can determine the big picture.

 

Then a familiar voice cuts through his thoughts, and he looks up to see Natasha on television. The news has picked up the C-SPAN feed from the U.S., which has apparently been covering the emergency sessions on Capitol Hill. He gapes, half disbelieving and half relived at the sight of her, hair all smooth, makeup just so, expression barely masking her annoyance, at least from him, but then he’s one of only a few people who can read her.

 

He fumbles for the remote again and turns up the volume in time to hear her inform the committee that they’re not going to put her in prison, and holy fuck, Nat, what the hell are you doing, he thinks, crawling to the foot of the bed and perching as close to the screen as he can without going cross-eyed. Yes, he sees better from a distance, but right now he wants so badly to reach out and touch her, to make sure she’s really all right, that he’ll take whatever proximity he can manage, even if it is an illusion.

 

They move in for a close up, and Clint can see the tension in her eyes. She’s rattled, despite the cool presentation and confident statements. He knows this persona – it’s her all purpose, woman-in-charge identity, good for undercover ops requiring her to play anyone from a CEO to a whip-wielding dominatrix.  No one messes with Natasha cloaked in this façade, not if they know what’s good for them. But the real Natasha, the one beneath the role she plays, feels far less pulled together right now. If he couldn’t tell from her eyes, the necklace she wears would give it all away.

 

It’s a small arrow on a fine gold chain. Clint hasn’t seen it in a couple of years, though he knows she treasures it and keeps it safe. Still, it’s not something she can wear for an op – far too identifiable – and so she pulls it out only for special occasions, or when she needs a bit of silent emotional support in real life.

 

Clint gave her the necklace, a few weeks after they stopped sleeping with each other. They’d agreed they were better off as friends, that the fucking – while fabulous – messed too much with the dynamics of their relationship, but he had wanted a way to tell her, to _show_ her, how much she meant to him. Words weren’t exactly his strong suit, and Nat never dealt well with messy confessions, anyway, so he’d had the necklace commissioned and just dropped it in her palm one day after they’d finished sparring. He knew she understood it was a promise – that he wasn’t going anywhere, that he’d always have her six, that he loved her no matter how little store she put in the concept. She was his best friend, his sister, his partner, and the sex had been completely besides the point.

 

He watches her stand and stride confidently out of the session. Congress isn’t her concern, that much he can tell, just from the way she moves, a little tilt to her head, hair swinging smoothly. He wonders if she’s as lost as he is, if the chaos has her grasping for direction, for meaning, and he feels a pang of guilt for unwittingly bringing her into all of this, even though it was all he had to offer and the best choice at the time – certainly better than what she had been doing.

 

It’s tempting to send her another message but that will only annoy her. He trusts she received the first one and will respond if and when she wishes. Until then, she is more than capable of taking care of herself, and he has his own path to determine.

 

~*~

 

Clint buries himself in research for the next two days, breaking only to use the fitness center and to venture out into the streets in order to see if he’s been tracked to Geneva. He returns with bags of nuts and dried fruit and good Swiss chocolate to snack on in the room between meals, which he rotates between the hotel restaurants and the bar.

 

His first priority is to determine the damage to his own identity. Bad enough if the records of his work for SHIELD have spilled all over the internet; what he did before he went straight was far worse, and he has a number of covers from the old days that he maintained in case of emergencies. He needs to know what was leaked. So it comes as something of a surprise to discover the amount of information he _can’t_ actually find. His mission reports for his entire history with SHIELD are out there, but only the redacted versions. Not only was his record before joining completely cleared, but the fact that he had a record _to_ clear seems to have been erased as well. Nor is there anything linking him by name to the Avengers Initiative.

 

Clint’s last status report is an update after Project Pegasus went south, stating he’d been compromised and held hostage by the alien known as Loki, recovered by Agent Romanoff, and cleared to resume duty following extensive debrief and psychological review. After that, he falls off the electronic grid. Nothing about Fury’s mission to nowhere, no sign of his reports back over the past year and change. It’s as if he vanished entirely.

 

It’s a relief, of course, and something of a surprise. He has always been aware of Fury’s penchant for keeping certain files hard copy only, generally information limited to the top couple of clearance levels if not just to himself. But there is a huge amount of information that seems to have been omitted or eliminated. Plenty of damaging stuff hit the ‘net, but the truly bad intel – the information that would have sent dozens of people gunning for Clint – did not.

 

Needing to determine if it’s a fluke – or a flaw in his own search skills – he moves on to Natasha, digging as deeply as he can to find whatever’s out there. As with him, her entire mission history with SHIELD is readily available. However, her origins with the KGB and her status as a defector also pop up. But when Clint finds her birthdate listed as 1984, he realizes where the truth stops and the lies begin, because outside of Coulson and Clint himself, who heard the entire story from Natasha’s lips before they even brought her back to SHIELD – or at least the bones of it – only Fury and Hill know the details of the Red Room experiments and Natasha’s true age.

 

Nick Fury always played the long game. Clint knows this – has known it almost from his first days with SHIELD. It takes a man with great foresight to sign on a former circus act with a history as a merc, to give him the chance to change his life, because SHIELD isn’t a charity, and to a lot of people it seemed like _an act_ of charity to hire Clint on at the beginning.

 

Clint wonders how much Fury really knew about what was going on within the walls of his own organization. He doubts he’d caught on to Hydra’s presence, because no way would he have kept that little fact quiet. But he must have suspected something, had to have known danger was nipping at his heels. Paranoia alone wasn’t enough to explain some of the moves he’d made, and Clint knows from paranoia. He can only be thankful for the portion of Fury’s vision that’s allowed him to travel for so long unnoticed, and hope that his luck holds out.

 

He keeps digging, keeps trying to piece together a larger picture so he can formulate a plan of action, but it’s slow going, the information far flung, and half the time he doesn’t know what he’s even trying to find. By his final night in the hotel, he’s decided nothing other than he needs to move on. Expense aside, he doesn’t like the idea of staying in one place too long, and though Geneva appears safe, he isn’t willing to risk it by hanging around for a few more days. There’s another stash of money he can tap in Zurich, and after that, he needs to pick a fresh destination.

 

It’s late and he’s been lying in bed for hours, staring through the darkness, mind turning over his options, when he hears the buzz of an incoming message. Jerking upright, he grabs his phone and blinks at the screen. The sender registers as unknown, but he knows the code – an old one used by Strike Team Delta, which narrows down the potential callers considerably; only one other person living knows that code.

 

He rips a sheet of paper off the small notepad on the nightstand and scribbles out the message, then decodes it from memory, coming up with a date, time, and a set of coordinates that turn out to be somewhere on the eastern coast of Greece. Fingers clenched around the paper, he flops back on the bed and exhales in relief.

 

“Thanks, Nat,” he murmurs into the silence.

 

He lies there a few minutes, then heaves himself up onto his feet and goes into the bathroom. Smoothing the paper out on the counter, he commits the data to memory, then he pulls a lighter from his toiletry kit and sets the sheet aflame.

 

~*~

 

TBC 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clint finally learns… well, a whole lot, and has to make a decision about where his loyalties lie and his plans for the future.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the longer wait between updates. This part was a bear for so many reasons, and is also significantly longer than the previous chapters just because there's no logical breaking point. Hope that makes up for the wait! Thanks to everyone who has been reading along, and rest assured there are more stories coming in this series.
> 
> Also, please note I've added a tag for Agents of SHIELD spoilers, for vague references to events at the close of season one.

Clint gets out of Switzerland the next day. He has nearly a week until he needs to be at the meeting place, but the longer the route he takes, the safer he’ll feel. It’s one thing to worry about a tail for your own sake; a different one entirely to compromise another person because you didn’t notice someone following you. After a brief stop in Zurich to replenish his funds, he heads into Austria – Italy still being on his to-avoid list, and Germany having been added once Hydra decided to join the party. From there he slowly works his way east and south, first to Ljubljana – because Budapest’s on his _permanent_ avoidance list – then Zagreb, and finally Belgrade, where he lays low for a full day before pressing on to Sofia, and finally Athens with a day and a half to spare.

 

His ultimate destination turns out to be no more than a village, technically on the eastern coast of Greece, but far down in the Peloponnese. He takes the train as far as Argos, but from there it’s another four miles and change to the village of Myloi, and he cannot help but wonder what exactly the purpose is of this trip to the middle of nowhere.

 

By the time Clint arrives on the main street of Myloi, he feels dry and dusty, despite the mild weather, and thoroughly tired of traveling. He navigates according to his StarkPhone and is perhaps unreasonably relieved to discover the exact coordinates for his meeting align with a tiny taverna. He’s a little early, and he speaks precisely no Greek, but really, all he wants is to sit, put down his things, and have something to drink.

 

The taverna is one long white-washed room with about eight scattered wooden tables and a narrow bar to one side, a swinging door at the far end presumably leading to a kitchen, and another door at the back leading outside. The windows are all pushed open, allowing a pleasant salt-tinged breeze to filter gently through the room, stirring gauzy white curtains held back with blue sashes.

 

A woman comes bustling in from the back as if somehow summoned by his presence. She’s maybe inching into middle aged, a few greys threading through wavy dark hair held back by a green scarf, but her tanned face is smooth, dark eyes bright as she shoots off a couple of lines in rapid-fire Greek.

 

“Um…”

 

The eyes narrow, seeming to take in his face and dress, and she nods. “You sit in here or out back?” she translates, her English heavily accented but more than sufficiently clear to make Clint’s shoulders drop in relief.

 

“In here, if that’s all right,” he replies.

 

She waves her hand, indicating he should take his pick of the empty restaurant. He wonders if it gets busy in the evenings. It’s just shy of four p.m., but he can’t imagine a town of this size has a lot of options for nightlife as the hour grows later. Though presumably the residents like it that way.

 

He settles on a table by the wall, between two windows with a good view of all the doors, and shifts his bag off his back. He glances around for a restroom, but she anticipates his desires.

 

“You need wash up, men’s room through back door, to right,” she tells him, gesturing.

 

He nods, hoping she’s not sending him to an outhouse. “Thank you,” he says. “I’ll be right back.”

 

Following her instructions leads to a flagstone patio, where there are even more tables under a yellow striped awning – one occupied by an old man nursing a cup of something and staring at the water – and what was clearly a small addition built onto the rear of the building to accommodate restrooms. He goes into the one with the little stick-figure man on the door, happy to find it a single unit, and locks the door behind him.

 

When he returns to his table, he finds a pitcher of water and two glasses waiting for him, along with a basket of bread. He frowns, glancing around as he drops his bag and shoves it up against the wall, but there’s no sign of Natasha and the waitress has vanished, presumably into the kitchen. Clint tugs out a chair, angling it slightly so his back is to the wall, and sits with a barely audible sigh, reaching for the pitcher.

 

Part of him wishes he was in New York instead, grabbing beer and a couple of slices at the pizza joint around the corner from his old apartment. He’s looking forward to seeing Nat, to getting all the details he’s missing about what the hell happened with SHIELD, but at the same time he knows the conversation will likely result in his taking off on some other mission, and the fact is… he’s tired. Tired of wandering the world, tired of looking over his shoulder and rigging his rooms against intruders, and tired of wondering what unpleasant truth he’ll uncover next.

 

Clint joined SHIELD thinking he knew all the terrible, cruel, inhumane things people did to each other in the name of greed and power and control, but this job has proved him wrong a hundred times over, and now he understands that it just never stops. Someone will always dream up some new and vicious way to cause suffering and despair. And while he swore long ago to be one of the people standing between those monsters and their victims, the process has worn him down. He just hopes he hasn’t inadvertently done any of Hydra’s dirty work for them.

 

He’s guzzling down his water – room temperature, but he’s gotten used to that and hydration is hydration – when the back door swings open. He glances over, expecting the waitress, and almost drops his glass when Nick Fury walks into the room. Gone is the long, swishing leather duster, the eye patch, the unrelieved black; he’s wearing black cargo pants and has a black leather jacket thrown over one shoulder, but his shirt is actually a dark red plaid and he’s sporting sunglasses with tortoise shell frames. Still, there’s no mistaking who he is, and after a moment’s fumbling, almost knocking the chair out from under him, Clint struggles to stand.

 

“None of that,” Fury says as he approaches, waving his hand at him to stay where he is. He pulls out the chair opposite, drapes his jacket over the back and sits. “Sorry I didn’t respond to your last check-in,” he says, reaching for the pitcher and filling his water glass. “Was kind of busy getting shot at the time.”

 

Clint starts, and only then does he realize that today would have been his scheduled day to report. He shakes his head. “I thought… Nat said you were dead,” he says in a low voice.

 

“I’m not that easy to kill,” Fury replies, taking a sip of water. He sets his glass down and tips his head in acknowledgement. “I know you figured Romanoff was the one who set this meeting.”

 

“Made sense,” he acknowledges. “She’s the one who’d warned me to run. Plus that was a Strike Team Delta code, sir.”

 

“Please. Coulson and I were using that code back when you were still taking out low level mob bosses for peanuts. But I knew he’d used it with you and Romanoff. It was a logical choice.”

 

Because Hydra wouldn’t know it, Clint finishes in his head. “Sir, what happened?” he asks quietly.

 

“I’m assuming you’ve got the basics from the media. For once they’re mostly reporting facts, though most of them are turned upside down and sideways,” Fury says. “If you’re asking did I know Hydra had wormed their way into the foundations of SHIELD? Hell, no. But I knew something was up, have known since New York. The World Security Council may be a bunch of assholes, but setting a nuke on Manhattan was a whole different level of stupid, way too calculated to have been motivated just by fear of the Chitauri.”

 

He pauses and a second later the kitchen door swings open and the waitress from earlier comes over. Fury assesses Clint for a moment, then turns and shoots out a whole bunch of Greek he hasn’t a chance of following, though he hears something that sounds like it might be salad, so he’s hopeful that Fury’s ordering dinner. The waitress asks something and Fury shakes his head, and she’s gone.

 

Fury leans in, settling his forearms on the table. “The three helicarriers, the ones Rogers and Romanoff took out, were part of Project Insight. We needed something strong enough to take out a terrorist at a distance, something that would give us the upper hand against targets that might be too powerful for us to face up close.”

 

“You mean they could target someone from the air and hit them? What kind of range are we talking?”

 

“Satellite targeting system. What kind of range you think?”

 

“Holy shit, sir, that’s… How did you think that was a good idea?”

 

Fury points a finger at him. “You’re the one always going on about seeing better at a distance.”

 

“But I can still _see_ the target!” Clint insists, struggling to keep his voice down. “All due respect, sir, but there’s a big difference between shooting from a distance and shooting blind. If you’d had that technology fifteen years ago, I’d be nothing more than a splotch on the sidewalk instead of a SHIELD agent. Same with Agent Romanoff.”

 

“Fifteen years ago, we weren’t fighting off aliens in midtown Manhattan.” He shakes his head. “I knew it wasn’t the best option. Trouble was, it was the only option at the time and we needed to be prepared for the next incident. I figured… I figured I’d be able to keep things at a reasonable level.”

 

“How’s that working out for you?” Clint mutters.

 

“Doing this job has always involved walking a tight rope, and that means making decisions that might be unpopular. That doesn’t mean I don’t have a line I won’t cross.”

 

“Yes, sir.”

 

“And cut that shit out. Do I look like your boss right now? I’m officially dead for crying out loud.”

 

Clint nods. “So when were you sure something was wrong?”

 

“I arranged for Romanoff to get access to the targeting ship and download the SHIELD data in the system. When she brought it back I couldn’t access the file or break the encryption.”

 

“Under whose authority?”

 

“My own, apparently,” he says wryly.

 

Clint feels his eyebrows climbing. “Who would have had the clearance to lock it down that way, using your name?”

 

Fury shrugs. “You know the answer. But I was stupid, couldn’t imagine Pierce was the one responsible. Asked him to move to postpone Project Insight, just until I could get more information, and he agreed. I left the Triskelion for a meeting and was ambushed en route. T-boned at an intersection, then four police cars surrounded me and started shooting at my vehicle. Half my defensive systems were down, had to wait for a reboot, complete shit show.”

 

“I’m assuming they were Hydra?”

 

“Or hired thugs,” he says. “Not cops, that’s for sure. Got out of there, went through the whole high-speed chase through downtown, trying to get clear of traffic and make it to a safe house. Then this guy steps out in front of me, shoots something under my vehicle that flips it. Had to cut my way out through the sewers.”

 

“I saw footage of that guy,” Clint says. “The news was speculating he was the same one Rogers fought at the Triskelion.”

 

“Sure was. The Winter Soldier,” Fury says pointedly.

 

Clint gapes. “Wait. _Natasha’s_ Winter Soldier?”

 

“The one and only.” He holds up a hand, signaling Clint to let him finish. “I made it to Rogers’s apartment, laid low until he got back. I still had the drive with the Project Insight files and I didn’t know who else I could trust. I’d called Hill before the ambush, told her to get down to D.C., but she wasn’t going to be there for a couple of hours and I couldn’t risk waiting. Soldier followed me. I barely got a chance to warn Rogers that SHIELD was compromised and not to trust anyone before I got shot through the window.”

 

Fury reaches for his water and finishes it, setting the glass down with a soft thunk. “I’m a little fuzzy on the details after that, but Hill made it to me at the hospital. There’s a drug – one of Banner’s – that slows the heartbeat. We used that to fake my death, though between you and me it was a close call anyway. She got me out. But Rogers and Romanoff were both there with the doc called in, and Hill said they spent some time with me after.”

 

“Natasha must have been… Sir, you know how many people she trusts,” Clint says. “Did you have to let her think you were dead?”

 

“It was less than forty-eight hours, Barton. Everything was on the line. I couldn’t risk it.”

 

“It was _Natasha_! She’d do _anything_ for you, you know that!”

 

“What I know is that she’s a former KGB spy, who was brainwashed and conditioned in the Red Room before she defected and joined SHIELD rather than have you put a fucking arrow through her,” Fury grinds out. “Forgive me if I felt the need to wait a couple of days before letting her know the legendary assassin who _trained her_ hadn’t quite managed to finish me off!”

 

Clint rocks back in his chair and stares at him.

 

Fury sighs. “I _wanted_ to trust her. I was… pretty sure I could. But I couldn’t afford to be wrong.”

 

Clint drops his gaze to the rough table top. He might have made the initial call to bring Natasha in instead of taking her out, and Coulson might have backed him, but Fury had been the one to make the final decision. He chose to hire her instead of kill her, he gave her a chance, and Natasha never forgot a debt. But he can understand how Fury might have second guessed himself, especially with a few bullets in his hide.

 

Fury takes his silence for agreement, or at least for permission to continue. “I only know this bit second hand,” he says. “Pierce called Rogers into his office, wanted to know why I’d been at his place when I was shot.”

 

“He wanted the drive,” Clint guesses.

 

“Likely. But Rogers kept his mouth shut, so Pierce had Strike ambush him in the elevator on his way out.”

 

“Alpha? Rumlow and those guys he’d been working with?”

 

Fury nods.

 

“Shit, Steve must have been pissed.”

 

“He took it kinda personal,” Fury admits. “He leveled them, ended up jumping through the wall of the elevator and falling through that glass roof on the lobby, landed on his shield. Think he surprised a few people when he got up and ran for it.”

 

“He was okay?”

 

“A little bruised,” Fury says. “Probably healed up before he hit the Mall. He and Natasha ran a trace on the drive, followed the trail to New Jersey where SHIELD originated in an old bunker beneath what was Camp Lehigh.”

 

“Where Steve trained before they gave him the serum?”

 

“Yeah. Howard Stark was a fan of symmetry, gotta give the man that.”

 

“I’m almost afraid to ask what they found.”

 

“A room full of old computer equipment, and apparently the mind of Arnim Zola, transferred completely prior to his death in the 1970s.”

 

“Zola. The guy who worked for the Nazis?”

 

“For Hydra,” Fury corrected. “We brought him in after the war as part of Project Paperclip, and apparently he was the foundation for Hydra within SHIELD.”

 

“Fuck,” Clint says. “But what do you mean his mind was in the computer?”

 

“Think Stark’s AI on a real low tech basis. Turns out Hydra had him work up an algorithm for Project Insight predicting all the targets they considered to be a threat to SHIELD, now and in the future, based on human behavior. Listed millions of targets, including all the Avengers, Stephen Strange, the President, and so on.”

 

“And they were going to use the new helicarriers to take them all out?”

 

“Best estimate, three-quarters-of-a-million people at a time. More if they had a high density population in a targeted area.”

 

Clint had no words. His mind couldn’t wrap around the enormity of what Hydra – what _Pierce_ – had been willing to do.

 

“SHIELD tracked them to Jersey, launched a missile. Rogers managed to pull Natasha free from the rubble and somehow they got back to D.C., got help from a buddy of Rogers’s – vet named Sam Wilson.”’

 

Clint frowns. “Why is that name familiar?”

 

“He was para-military. One of the team involved in that Falcon wing-pack project.”

 

“Right,” Clint nodded.

 

“They were on their way to try and stop the Project Insight launch when the Winter Soldier showed up with a group of Hydra muscle, attacked them on the causeway over Virginia Avenue. Might have been close, but they were too heavily outnumbered, and Rogers got distracted. Strike came in and bundled all three of them off.”

 

“How was Steve was distracted? Did something happened?”

 

“You might say that. Winter Soldier lost his mask during the fight and Rogers got a good look at his face, recognized him.”

 

“I know Nat said they kept him on ice when they weren’t using him, that he didn’t age normally, but are you saying Steve fought the Winter Soldier back during the war?”

 

“I’m saying he didn’t start out as Hydra or as some Soviet soldier. They dug him out of an icy ravine in the Alps as a wounded sergeant of the United States Army and turned him into the weapon.”

 

You didn’t spend any significant amount of time in safe houses with Phil Coulson and escape learning the entire history of Captain America and his Howling Commandos. “Are you telling me the Winter Soldier is Bucky Barnes?”

 

Fury nods.

 

“Man, Steve must have been stunned.”

 

“Hill went in undercover with Strike, got all three of them away before anything happened, but she said Rogers was pretty shook up. Natasha had taken a bullet and he didn’t notice until Hill had them back at the makeshift HQ we’d set up.”

 

Clint frowns. “Is Nat okay?”

 

“Fine. She was front and center when we went in to stop Project Insight the next day. Rogers and Wilson changed out the targeting chips, Hill manned the computer to alter the targets once we had control, and Natasha prepped the server for the info dump.”

 

“So you were in on that, then. I’d wondered how they managed to bypass the authorization.”

 

“I still had my back door, and we convinced Pierce to cooperate.”

 

“I’m guessing it was a little more complicated than that.”

 

“Hell, yeah, but this short version is already ages too long, and I’m damned hungry.” He turns and waves toward the kitchen and the door swings open almost instantly. The waitress peers out and waves back before disappearing again.

 

Fury faces Clint again and reaches to refill both their water glasses. “I’ll get us some booze after we eat.”

 

“Sure,” he agrees, not really caring. He’s still reeling from all the information. “Did Nat tell Steve about her history with the Winter Soldier?”

 

“She told him about Odessa, before they learned the Soldier’s Barnes, but nothing from before. She couldn’t, not without spilling it all, and that’s not anything he needs to know at this stage.”

 

“I figure it’s up to her.”

 

“It is. We dumped an uncomfortable amount of information on the internet. That was Rogers’s call, and frankly, he’d earned the right to make it. But you’ll likely have noticed some omissions. Romanoff’s back history, pre-KGB, was always classified and hard copy only. After New York, when I suspected I was going to send you out long term, I pulled the more incriminating data from your digital file, too. I couldn’t delete as much as I’d have liked, not without raising flags, but it should be enough to keep both of you relatively safe.”

 

The food arrives, salad with feta and cucumbers and fat black olives, and a platter of roast chicken with oregano and crisp broiled potatoes that are fork tender inside and taste like lemon. Clint stares at the food, finding the scene eerily reminiscent of the day Fury brought him in, only that took place in a sleazy dive bar in a rough part of London over fish and chips and warm beer, and Clint had been running for three days with a knife would in his thigh. And then Fury had been _recruiting_ him for SHIELD, promising him a steady paycheck and top notch medical care and challenging work on the right side of the law, not confirming that the only home he’s had for more than a decade and the family he thought had his back is just so much shrapnel and dust in the wind.

 

“So that’s it,” he says, picking at his meal. “SHIELD’s gone.”

 

“That is _not_ it, and SHIELD is _not_ gone. Crippled, I’ll give you that. In sad need of a rebuild from the ground up. But the world needs protection more than it ever did.”

 

“You planning on coming back to life officially, sir?”

 

“No. I can accomplish more dead,” Fury says, stabbing a potato and popping it into his mouth. He looks momentarily blissful as he chews and swallows. “I’ve passed the reins.”

 

“Hill’s the new director?”

 

“Hill jumped ship. She got a job working for Stark Industries.”

 

Clint chokes out a laugh. “Let me guess. The private side of global security?”

 

Fury’s lips twitch. “Something like that. No, I’ve got someone else in place. They may or may not come looking for you, so I won’t say who it is. If they decide to recruit you, you’ll know soon enough. But Barton…” He leans over the table again, voice low. “It’s your decision what you do now. You’ve been a loyal employee, better than even I anticipated, and you’ve done good work. And I know you’ve seen the short end of the stick more than you should have.” He takes a breath. “If you decide to head for the hills, go civilian? I won’t hold it against you. Hell, can’t say I’d even blame you. After that mind fuck of Loki’s I half expected you to take off, go teach archery at the YMCA or some shit like that. But there’s still work to be done. So while I’d understand if you want out, I hope you’ll stay on.”

 

“Thought you said it was up to the new director to decide if he or she wanted me onboard.”

 

“SHIELD’s not the only game in town. You’ve been on the trail of something all year, don’t tell me you haven’t noticed.”

 

“Oh, I’ve noticed. You think it’s connected?”

 

“I think there’s something going on beyond SHIELD and Hydra, and when it comes, this’ll all seem like a schoolyard brawl in comparison.”

 

Clint grimaces. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

 

“Aside from that, Hydra broke into the Fridge, let out all the detainees and made off with a good portion of the confiscated tech.”

 

“Fuck, sir, you just thought to mention this now?”

 

“Not like you’re going to run off and do anything about it this minute, are you? We tracked those responsible, took back the tech they hadn’t distributed. But therein lies the issue. There were some very obvious items missing from the initial inventory.”

 

“Meaning it never arrived at the Fridge?”

 

“Correct. And you’re not going to like what it is.”

 

Clint feels icy fingers creep down his spine. “No.”

 

Fury nods. “The Chitauri weapons collected after the Battle of New York were never logged in at the Fridge, nor was Loki’s spear.”

 

“But sir, Sitwell collected those items himself. Why wouldn’t—”

 

“Sitwell was Hydra.”

 

“Jasper? Hydra? But how could… God, sir. He was…” He trails off, unable to come up with a coherent thought beyond “no.”

 

“Not just Sitwell,” Fury tells him. “John Garrett. He was the one to bust into the Fridge. Grant Ward was with him, killed Victoria Hand. They’re still trying to sort out who’s Hydra, who’s been killed, who just decided it was safer to run for it.”

 

“I… There were two guys from Beta team. In the Lyon train station. Overheard them talking about meeting up at the Paris base to help take out the SHIELD agents who wouldn’t swear allegiance. I killed them in the restroom.”

 

“There’s going to be more of that sort of thing. Too many people on the loose without information. A lot of low level agents getting questioned by the military, higher ups by Congress, everything tangled in bureaucratic red tape.”

 

“You’re saying I’m well clear of it all.”

 

Fury tilts his head. “Depending on your plans.”

 

Clint shook his head. “Sir, you know what I came from. I’ve got no one and nothing to go back to.”

 

“You’ve got the Avengers,” Fury points out.

 

“We’re spread to hell and gone. I haven’t heard from Nat since she warned me, so don’t tell me she’s not in the wind. And I’m betting Steve wants to find Barnes. Stark blew his suits to hell.” He shrugs. “We came together the once, and if I’m needed again I know I’ll go back. I suspect the others feel the same way. But that’s a part time gig, and it’s never been my style to just sit around. Whatever you’ve got for me, you know I’m in.”

 

Fury almost smiles. “Glad to hear it, Barton. Now finish eating. I’m gonna get us some ouzo.” He turns and waves toward the kitchen.

 

Suddenly ravenous, Clint picks up his fork and does as he’s been told.


End file.
